Building 53 Room 4025, Highfield Campus, 4pm. All welcome. Refreshments served after the talk.

Abstract:

How constrained is life’s evolution? Can mutations occur in any order? What fundamental processes dictate how evolution can proceed? I will discuss some work on experimental and model fitness landscapes that aims at understanding what is the minimum set of rules that are needed to characterize constraints in evolving genetic systems. The work tries to maximize the fit between real biological data and theroretical models. In particular, I will illustrate how both data analysis and model building can feed each other and may utlimately converge. This project aims at taking a step further in our comprehension of the life as it was, is and will be.